NetApp Steps Up Midrange SAN Battle

After years of dominating the network-attached storage (NAS) market, Network Appliance understands that in order to keep up with EMC, HP and others, it needs to offer customers a comprehensive storage area network (SAN) product line too.

NetApp on Monday introduced the NetApp FAS3040 and NetApp V3040 series, new weapons in its SAN storage array arsenal, to keep up with its competitors.

The systems come less than four months after NetApp added the FAS3070 and V3070 to satisfy the upper end of the midrange market.

The latest machines, which employ NetApp's all-in-one architecture to support Fibre Channel and iSCSI, are ideal for storing data created by data-intensive Oracle, SAP and Microsoft Exchange applications.

Patrick Rogers, vice president of solutions marketing at NetApp, said the unified architecture is appealing to customers who don't want to clutter their data centers with multiple boxes to handle different storage protocols. Having one FAS system handle several key methods lowers hardware costs and conserves space and energy in the datacenter.

"People love that because it's just very versatile," Rogers said.

Moreover, the machines boast a modular storage design, allowing customers to add more storage as needed and protect their investment: Customers with existing NetApp FAS models can swap old array heads with new ones to upgrade their capacity and performance.

These are value propositions that have some customers interested; since launching its first high-end unified array last spring, Rogers said NetApp has seen its SAN market share go from zero to 2.5 percent.

Related Articles

Rogers said the FAS3040 and V3040 compare favorably with EMC's Celerra NS80 NAS machines and Clariion CX3-40, as well as HP's EVA8000 in performance and capacity.

The FAS3040 and its gateway version brother V3040 support up to 252 disk drives and 126 terabytes of capacity. Rogers said the entry-level cost for a FAS3040 with 2TB of storage will set a buyer back $83,000.